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Yudkowsky, Pirsig, and Alexander walk into a bar, Taleb is tending bar

In this chapter I try to summarize the beliefs of four authors that I think have something to say about these ideas and to show what each one gets right, and where I think they fall short.

I understand the boldness of saying that these guys 'fall short.' Their intelligence surpasses mine and they know their areas way better than I do. If anything insightful comes of this work then I simply found myself in the right place at the right time and I read this stuff in the right order.

Christopher Alexander

Dr. Alexander, an architect, has spent his life studying the process necessary to build buildings that have a fullness of life and that have objective value. His most popular work, A Pattern Language, contributed to the inspiration for computing patterns in computer science. In trying to figure find the source of beauty in built things, he has found, via experiment, a set patterns in physical structure that humans react to in the same way. When shown differing images of structure, humans have more agreement than disagreement about what structures have more 'life' in them.

In his Nature Of Order series he has laid out these structures and how one can develop them. This system finds its base in the idea of 'centers' and the interactions of 'centers.' Each structure consists of a set of centers and one can calculate the value that each center contributes to the wholeness of the system by observing both the smaller centers that make up the center and the external centers that enhance the center.

15 properties enhance centers:

  1. Levels of Scale
  2. Strong Centers
  3. Thick Borders
  4. Positive Space
  5. Alternating Repetition
  6. Good Shape
  7. Local Symmetry
  8. Deep Interlock and Ambiguity
  9. Contrast
  10. Gradients
  11. Roughness
  12. Echoes
  13. The Void
  14. Simplicity and Inner-calm
  15. Each in the Other

Each of these characteristics has a corresponding life giving process that, if applied will increase the wholeness of the system. By following the following process, one can improve a system:

Alexander’s 10 structure-enhancing actions

  1. Step-by-step adaptation.
  2. Each step helping to enhance the whole.
  3. Always making centers.
  4. Allowing steps to unfold in the most fitting order.
  5. Creating uniqueness everywhere.
  6. Working to understand needs of users.
  7. Evoking & being guided by a deep feeling of whole.
  8. Finding coherent geometric order.
  9. Establishing a form language that rises from & shapes thing being made.
  10. Always striving for simplicity by which thing becomes more coherent & pure.

It turns out that integrating these 15 properties across higher order systems leads to a lot of things that make a whole lot of sense. I came up with the following trying to integrate over the concept of banking:

  1. Levels of Scale -> Economic Organization
  2. Strong Centers -> Citizens Transactions
  3. Boundaries -> Separation of Accounts
  4. Alternating Repetition -> Money Life Cycle
  5. Positive Space -> Market Satisfaction
  6. Good Shape -> Fairness
  7. Local Symmetries -> Transparency
  8. Deep Interlock and Ambiguity -> Transaction Dependency
  9. Contrast -> Identity
  10. Gradients -> Disbursement
  11. Roughness -> User Friendliness
  12. Echos -> Patterns
  13. The Void -> Legal Entities
  14. Simplicity and Inner Calm -> Reliability
  15. Not Separateness -> Elegance

Leslie Wauguespack expands on these ideas and applies them to software systems in Thriving System Theory and Metaphor Driven Modeling.

Wholeness in systems can be evaluated using the following properties:

  1. Levels of Scale -> Stepwise Refinement
  2. Strong Centers -> Cohesion
  3. Boundaries -> Encapsulation
  4. Alternating Repetition -> Extensibility
  5. Positive Space -> Modularization
  6. Good Shape -> Correctness
  7. Local Symmetries -> Transparency
  8. Deep Interlock and Ambiguity -> Composition of Function
  9. Contrast -> Identity
  10. Gradients -> Scale
  11. Roughness -> User Friendliness
  12. Echos -> Patterns
  13. The Void -> Programmability
  14. Simplicity and Inner Calm -> Reliability
  15. Not Separateness -> Elegance

After reading Alexander's Nature of Order I have a deep conviction that he has discovered something very, very valuable. The ability to improve systems by recursive refinement with focused goals of strengthening centers can be a radical formulation of improving our world.

I don't think Alexander gets it 100% correct and I think focus his focus on architecture limits the applicability(but probably necessary to the formulation of the theory). It has much broader applications.

I recommend the following to learn more about Christopher Alexander:

The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe, Book 1 - The Phenomenon of Life (Center for Environmental Structure, Vol. 9)

The Process of Creating Life: Nature of Order, Book 2: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe

The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe, Book 3 - A Vision of a Living World

The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe, Book 4 - The Luminous Ground

A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (Center for Environmental Structure)

The Timeless Way of Building

The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth: A Struggle Between Two World-Systems (Center for Environmental Structure)

Christopher Alexander: The Search for a New Paradigm in Architecture

Eliezer Yudkowsky

Eliezer wrote a series of blog posts over the course of number of years and combined them into a book called Rationality: From AI to Zombies.These show how to think rationally and how to think like a scientist. He points out a number of things that I had not thought of before and approaches hard to understand topics with clear explanation.

Yudkowsky approaches the world as a reductionist, a Bayesian, and he isn't going to cut you a bit of slack on your metaphysics. If the map doesn't match the territory he will call bs on you. He will force you to redraw your map.

He believes that ultimately the world consists of just quarks but he's not against good maps, in fact, he's all about good maps which brings me to conclude, ultimately, that he and Dr. Pirsig will find more in common that you would think. I think this because at the end of the day, Yudkowsky has some raging humanist tendencies. One must reconcile ‘just quarks’ and humanism.

If you like your rationality laid out in story form you can read his Harry Potter fan fiction (yes really) at http://hpmor.com/.

Robert Pirsig

Robert Pirsig, best known for Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, puts forth a theory that there a driving force to our universe called Quality that originates and drives our perceptions of subjects and objects. He expands on this in a follow up book called Lila that has the meat of what I'd like to talk about. In Lila he goes deeper into creating a 'Metaphysics of Quality' and trades his Classic/Romantic split of ZMM for the Dynamic/Static distinction of Lila.

His ideas split our world into 4 levels of static quality and that approaching the world from these four levels helps to alleviate and clarify many of the moral dilemmas that we face in our modern world. The levels are:

  1. Inorganic - matter
  2. Biological - anything with DNA
  3. Societal - Human organizations that a scientific instrument can't detect
  4. Intellectual - The manipulation of symbols which have abstract meaning

Pirsig contends that each of these build on the level before via a process of dynamic quality. At each level some effects dynamic quality 'latch' and become static quality. Each level depends on the level before, but operates on a completely different value structure. The value patterns at the inorganic level becomes a thing to overcome at the next higher level(biological). In fact most of the adaptations at the biological level have to do with holding back the inherent chaos present at the inorganic level.

Pirsig system of the levels gave me a nice structure to filter some of my ideas through. Pirsig's ultimately concludes that no territory actually exists and that we only have maps. Alternatively, quality helps us build the maps, but in the end they only exist in our heads. This conclusion concerns me. I also feel that he missed a couple of nuances about the levels that I will clarify later.

Nassim Taleb

Taleb's puts forth the big idea of anti-fragility. Glass has fragility. When you mail a glass you put fragile on the outside so that the mail carrier will subject it to as little volatility as possible. A rock has robustness. If you mail the rock it isn't going to change much during a volatile transfer. The anti-fragile moves beyond robust. An anti-fragile thing will gain from volatility. You want the mail carrier to play volleyball with the anti-fragile package.

Taleb contends that all sorts of areas out there where we can put ourselves in an anti-fragile position.

I think that Taleb's understanding of risk and 'black swan' events leads him to make some backward facing conclusion. His antifragile revelation turns a lot of these on their heads and I think that with this new approach, he can break out of some of his uber-conservative tendencies. Not to say that his conclusions aren't right, only to say that there we can find an approach to these fragile systems that moves them towards anti-fragile.

Read more from Taleb:

Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (Incerto)

Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (Incerto)

The Black Swan

Alexander vs. Pirsig

Alexander puts forth the ideas of stepwise refinement toward wholeness. I believe that these rules of development parallel the modes of operation of Pirsig's dynamic quality. Pirsig's lets any dynamic quality generate a static pattern of value. In other words, no guard rails contain this dynamic quality. Alexander puts on guard rails. Dynamic quality produces static ratchets most often in ways presented in Alexander’s 15 processes.

Theory: If one looks at the wake of dynamic quality, one will most often find operations corresponding to one or a combination of many of the 15 processes.

Test: Compare dynamic to static latches across a number of domains and compare latches that fall under the 15 properties vs. other categories.

Alexander vs. Yudkowsky

Yudkowsky comes down squarely on the side of a completely hostile universe. He warns that we must tread lightly as we move toward an Artificial Intelligence because it may decide that it no longer needs us and it could bring about the end of the human race. I don't doubt that this possibility, but I think he misses the Luminous Ground that Alexander speaks of in the Nature of Order. Now Yudkowsky would probably reject this seemingly silly concept out right.

Alexander’s Luminous Ground puts forth some 'other' that causes nature to work toward wholeness. To his credit Alexander spends hundreds of pages laying out empirical evidence for this case. Perhaps some of needs fleshing out, especially in areas outside of architecture, but to Alexander's credit he calls for much more experiment and discovery.

Alexander’s conclusion leads to less of a concern of rogue AI if the development of it follows a stepwise pathway that ensures that wholeness increases. A wholeness aware and wholeness preserving AI should preserve and augment humanity instead of destroying it.

Alexander does point out ways in which some parts of a wholeness may break themselves up in order to increase wholeness and it does take a bit of faith, and perhaps hubris, to say that human beings increase the wholeness to an effect that an advanced AI would want to keep us around.

Postulate: If we approach AI development from a stepwise refinement manner and attempt to preserve and build wholeness, we will find an easier path to friendly AI.

Theory: Past stepwise refinement has increased wholeness and has typically not eliminated but enhanced existing culture and life.

Test: Observer advances in stepwise refinement vs. large jumps. We should see more preservation in the former. This give us confidence in one approach to future advancements vs. another (stepwise vs. broad jump)

Alexander vs. Taleb

Taleb's fears negative black swans that emerge out of the chaos of interrelated systems. Alexander points to a number of congruent examples, especially in architecture where a few like minded individuals looking for glory have driven 'good architecture' off a cliff and to a silly, anti-human place.

I think they would mostly agree, but I think that Alexander can take a bit of the edge off of Taleb's hardline conservative stance. Alexander's concludes that not all changes lead to ruin...the wholeness preserving and enhancing ones have value. We want them.

Let's take Taleb's argument against GMOs. Of course generating a form of wheat in a lab that adds many many new characteristics at one time and releasing it on the world can lead to disaster. But if we use stepwise refinement of the genome we can increase wholeness. Natural selection has executed this business of for hundreds of millions of years. Must we wait for wholeness to increase at a biological pace? I'd argue that we do not need to if we understand the wholeness increasing process. It does take time and effort to get to all the good things we want. But, if we want a wheat that resists disease and produces 10x per acre, we have to move forward at a faster than biological pace.

Postulate: Develop GMO techniques that follow stepwise refinement.

Pirsig vs. Taleb

I think Pirsig and Taleb would get along swimmingly. Taleb's Antifragile paralleles Pirsig's dynamic quality. In the same way that I think that Taleb could lose some of his conservative nature from Alexander, I think Prisig would help as well. Pirsig's latch adds an element to Taleb's antifragile. This latch could lead to massive change very quickly by amplifying the effect. If we have huge upside via antifragility, and that upside occurs via a positive black swan and then this event amplifies another antifragile situation we can have rapidly moving advancement. In fact I'll argue that Pirsig's levels derive from exactly these kinds of amplifications. I'll refer to these amplified antifragile situations that latch as bootstraps. They move so far that they appear to follow completely different sets of rules that the system that they emerged from.

Taleb would dismiss the impetus for these moves as fiddling with too much and opening us up to many more negative black swans. In a sense he's right, a comet colliding with earth would wipe out quite a bit of amplification, but would we want that amplification to not exist?

Postulate: We need to put ourselves in the position to take advantage of antifragile situations in such a way that they amplify the point of enhancing the wholeness of our reality. This manifests itself in the generation of a new kind of biology, a new form of biological system that enhances our well being, an amplification of our society, and/or an amplification of intelligence.

Pirsig vs Yudkowsky

I'd love to see this debate. Yudkowsky preaches materialism and a reductionism. Prisig says it all starts with quality and that the fact that we have an idea in our head of a quark finds basis in just a splitting of quality into subject and object.

At the end though they both concern themselves with maps and territories. Yudkowsky says the map must match the material territory. Pirsig says that quality generates maps and thus match the territory. To-matos/Tom-atos?

I think so. If anything, I think that Yudkowsky's humanism betrays his material/reductionist stance.

Yudkowsky vs. Taleb

I think these guys have reached many of the same conclusions about being careful when developing future tech, but they approach the world in two very different ways. Yudkowsky orientates toward futurism and aches to bring it to fruition and Taleb finds satisfaction with the way things were 1000 years ago(plus a little bit of medicine).

Other Authors Whose Ideas Color This Work

Francis Fukuyama

The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution

Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy

Fukuyama points out the importance of our political institutions Much of my proposed political structure derives from these ideas.

David Deutsch

The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

Deutsch's has contributed quite a bit to my thinking of how we move the intellectual layer forward and has some great ideas around knowledge and evil.

Peter M. Hoffmann

Life's Ratchet: How Molecular Machines Extract Order from Chaos

Hoffmann's idea of the biological reaching ratchet effects that help it withstand the molecular storm was integral to my development of the idea of higher layers operating independently of lower layers and my ultimate rejection of reductionism and determinism.

Borrowers Statement

I will state unequivocally that I have lifted many of the ideas in this volume, sometimes, and often without attribution from the above authors. I've tried to give credit where credit is due and I'll state for the record that it should be all of the credit.